The Idiot looms like a tumorous moon in the morning sky as Morris County Animal Control Officer Bailey Butler passes Stantonsville’s last operating gas station and turns off onto Franklin Road. For a merciful half-mile, a run of white ash and pignut hickory screens the Idiot from her sight until the canopy recedes, but then there it is again. Its enormous shadow haunts the feet of the western hills.

No one knows where the doll came from. With its blue glass eyes and ribboned hair, it looks like the ones you see at department stores and wonder who the hell buys them. “It’s gonna kill us in our sleep,” Kathy says, slapping Yuki’s hand away when he tries to play with the doll’s horsetail hair.

My wife sometimes asked what had gone wrong with us. She had always been our bank of compassion, the caretaker of our marriage, the one who diagnosed what was needed to keep us on track, and made sure that it was provided. I evaded the question. How could I tell her that somehow, along the way, she had transformed from the most beautiful person I had ever known to a grotesquerie, something it hurt me to even look at?

As violence, corporate greed, and international tension rise, we are all asking: What’s really going on beneath the surface of our society? Are we really as safe as we have been led to believe? And holy crap, how f*cked up is everything, really?

I can pinpoint one of my earliest moments of existential unease. I was nine years old and, defying my religiously conservative parents, snuck into the local movie theater to watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I didn’t understand the social politics of the movie at the time, and while faintly aroused by Jessica Rabbit I remained thoroughly confused by the idea of bestial human/toon marriage.